New Old World: An Indian Journalist Discovers the Changing Face of Europe

In 2009, journalist Pallavi Aiyar (Chinese Whiskers) moved her family from Beijing, where she had been a foreign correspondent, to Brussels for a new job reporting on Europe for India's Business Standard. In New Old World, she combines her firsthand experiences with investigative reporting to describe "what a First World crisis looks like from an emerging country point of view."

Aiyar feels at times that she "had not left communist China for capitalist Europe but capitalist China for a very socialist Europe." She finds that in many ways the middle classes of the developing world have a more comfortable life than their European equivalents, and that the most obvious difference between life in the developing and developed worlds is in the quality of health care and environmental safety. She has a wry view of the relative "Decline of Europe," saying "If Europe were no longer as dominant in the world because other nations... were finally catching up, shouldn't this, in fact, be celebrated rather than bemoaned?"

She dissects the politics of the fiscal crisis and the Copenhagen climate change talks, and compares longstanding European disunities with the new anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim backlash. Europeans often appear reflexively hostile to irrevocable changes exemplified by Chinese and Indian takeovers of European diamond, wine and steel industries, Sikh farm laborers in Italy, and elite Chinese children on "study group tours" seeing the sights, scorning the schnitzel and spending thousands at German luxury shops.

Aiyar is sharp, funny and knowledgeable. She brings an outsider's skepticism to the much-discussed problems of the European Union and what she considers its declining global importance, leadership and economic strength. --Sara Catterall

Powered by: Xtenit